A sixth-generation native of the Mississippi Delta country, Maude Schuyler Clay turned from the color photography that had been her mode to capture the look of her local landscape in black-and-white. She focuses on the flatlands themselves, their trees, bayous, old buildings and abandoned plantations -- enlivened by an occasional dog -- rather than the people and impoverished communities already documented by other photographers. And the results are often striking.

She attended the Memphis Academy of Arts and apprenticed with her cousin, photographer William Eggleston. By 1975, she was living in New York City and working at the Light Gallery. She returned to live in the Delta in 1987, and in 1993, she began to take black-and-white photographs of the Delta landscape.

Clay achieved national attention in 1999 with the publication of Delta Land (University Press of Mississippi), a collection of sepia photographs from the land she has lived in most of her life, for which she received the Mississippi Arts and Letters award in 2000.

The photographs are quite traditional, as befits their subject, and many have a haunting, elegiac quality. White, timeworn churches are a favorite subject, as in ''Church and Tree, Choctaw, Washington County,'' in which a prim old house of worship, standing in isolation, is played off against the free-form tree beside it. ''Cotton Field Church, Mattson, Mississippi,'' depicts a spired church sitting on its dignity across a scraggly field of cotton.   Other manmade structures are fading presences. ''Fitzgerald House, Albin, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi,'' a once-fancy abandoned dwelling, is a mere shadow of itself amid its surrounding trees and overgrowth. ''Pool, Mayfair Plantation, Sunflower County'' sits weedy and deserted in a dead landscape.  Ms. Clay is also enamored of the way water seeps through the land in the form of creeks, bayous and swamps.

Her photographic work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, The London Observer Magazine, Mothers and Daughters, Women Photographers and other books. Some of Clay's work is housed in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts-Houston and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington, D.C.